[Note: This piece is a sidebar to The Op-Ed Assassination of Hugo Chávez]
A common charge in U.S. op-ed pages is that Venezuela is muzzling journalists who are critical of the government. For instance, the San Diego Union-Tribune (4/5/05) claims that Chávez “has pushed press gag laws through a compliant National Assembly.”
There are reasons for civil libertarians to be concerned about Venezuela’s new media law. The Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television, passed in 2004, permits the government to suspend and even close stations that “promote, defend or incite breaches of public order or that are contrary to the security of the nation.” Other laws, echoing official disparagement laws in several neighboring countries, prohibit insulting the president and other high officials. These laws have already resulted in a small number of legal actions (Washington Post, 7/15/05), and, as critics point out, the larger threat is the self-censorship these laws engender in journalists who may avoid controversial issues in fear of official sanction (Knight Ridder, 10/18/05; AP, 10/9/05).
But despite these wrongheaded laws, Venezuela’s powerful privately owned media sector—which includes five out of the seven major TV networks and nine out of the 10 major daily papers—continues to oppose Chávez in no uncertain terms. Contrary to claims of widespread press-gagging, observers of Venezuelan media have noted the freedom with which Venezuela’s private media routinely criticize and even vilify the government.
During Venezuela’s 2002 coup, most private media went so far as to directly support the overthrow of the elected government, shedding even the pretense of journalistic standards. “Never even in Latin American history,” wrote Le Monde Diplomatique’s Maurice Lemoine (8/02), “have the media been so directly involved in a political coup.”
John Dinges, a Columbia University journalism professor who recently visited Venezuela (Miami Herald, 7/27/05), found that the country had an “energetic, free and combative radio, television and newspaper establishment.” Mark Weisbrot, who was in Venezuela this spring, noted (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 6/17/05) that on the country’s biggest TV channels, “there were commentators and experts trashing the government, in ways that do not happen in the United States or indeed most countries in the world.”
Whatever the current state of free expression and dissent in Venezuela, these restrictive laws contain the potential for abuse by current and future governments. By keeping vague and restrictive laws on the books, the Venezuelan government is not only compromising the ideals of free expression, it is giving its opponents a real grievance to rally around, and providing U.S. op-ed writers with at least one legitimate target.
